I haven't posted a blog in a while, mainly because I've been very busy with finishing up my penultimate semester in grad school. But I thought I'd like to sit down by the fire with all of you electronic blog-reading folks and ask you to remember the holidays are fast approaching. What better gift to give to your loved ones than the gift of reading?

So, with this in mind, I'd like to recommend some books to you for gifts. All of these books I count as influences for The Advance Guard,
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Attempting to clear my mind on the day before Halloween, so here goes with a short lark. I'm writing this on the fly, so please bear with me, and I'd love for any and all to comment. This uses my Advance Guard characters, and takes place after the book. Enjoy!

The Witching Hour

Darkness, the normal terrain of a basement, cracked as the light switched on in the barracks room. The hand on the switch, coated in orange fur, preceded the entry of its owner, Kitty Lazarus.
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After taking a few days off from blogging, I decided to check on the hit counters on not only the "Characters in Action" entries but the sample chapters as well, just as a means of trying to see which characters seem to be liked the best. This time I'm only focusing on this blog.

The (again, unscientific) measure I'm using is views of entries for each character. This time, the "Phantom Squadron" chapter will count for all four, so each character is spotted 18
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“I hope this works for her.”
Ken Sharpe sighed deeply as he knocked on the steel door. Cyrus Salem looked up at him, smiling.
“I think it will. Trust me.”
The door opened. Ariel Vibria poked her face through the opening, looking half asleep but still smiling when she saw the two men. “Come in, guys.”
“Actually, we need you to come with us. We have somewhere
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The night was rainy and cold, too wet for what she was used to. The thick fabric of her sweatshirt clung to her body, creating a damp, uncomfortable cocoon around her. Water dripped down off of the hood, already too saturated to resist the moisture at all. She pulled it further down in front of her face.
The sight of her hand frightened her more. She quickly plunged her fist back into the pocket of her sweatshirt, looking
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The team approached a clearing, their steps becoming as light as possible. Movement caught Lazarus’ eye immediately from the place; she motioned behind her for Lonstein then crept up through the trees. Her body slithered along the ground, her steps making almost no sound, until she was at the edge of the clearing.
Lonstein tiptoed up behind her. She quickly turned around and motioned for him to drop to
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Again, no preliminaries. A Cyrus-centered chapter from The Advance Guard, available now from Amazon.com

In two weeks’ time, the Marines set up a camp, on the outskirts of a small village near Khe Sanh. Sergeant Rich had some uncomfortable questions about the location, which Cyrus had quick answers for: on a hot afternoon, the smaller man took a quick reconnoiter through the village and, finding it deserted, granted permission for Rich and his men to drive stakes.
In the
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Here it is, the most intensive promotion I've done for The Advance Guard: Sample chapters.

I will simply post the chapters, without any kind of preliminary: it'll be up to you, if you want to pick up a copy of the book, to find out their context.

Here we go!

Snow was falling, an event slightly unusual for Maryland regardless of the time of year. Cadet footsteps had crunched into the snow on the ground, their careless walking and marching turning the fresh
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To garner some more interest in The Advance Guard, I'm going to be doing some more substantive blogging than my Tweet feeds. Starting on Monday, I will post a series of five blogs, each of which will be an entire chapter of the book, the ones that in my opinion are the strongest chapters from each of the five sections. It's my hope that, if you read these chapters, you'll be interested enough to maybe pick up a copy.

Also, next week I will post in these blogs a discount code for the
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Since I wasn't feeling in the greatest of moods yesterday, I decided to perk myself up by bringing forth an unusual AG feed on Twitter. I put out a feed of some external quotes which are used to effect in The Advance Guard (on sale now at Amazon.com). The book is divided into five sections, and a quote is located at the start of each section, just to set the mood for the reader and give a sense of foreshadowing to the section's contents.

As I've been blogging Advance Guard-related blogs on three sites over the past weeks since it went to press, I've been keeping an eye on two of them (this one and animeotaku.com) where I posted the character profiles individually. (The third blog, at animeforums.com, had them posted in one shot)

Being strictly unscientific, I decided to see which character seems to be the most popular among the four central characters. After having all four character blogs up for two weeks now,
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Continuing with my series of blogs collecting my daily Tweet feeds in support of The Advance Guard (on sale now, available at Amazon.com), yesterday featured two feeds. The primary feed was one about the book's villain characters, which while they hold a big piece of the story are not really a big focus in the narrative ... I like to think that it's more about my protagonists and their individual crises, as opposed to being a straight-up "let's beat up villains" story.

Continuing this week's series of Twitter feeds about The Advance Guard (on sale now, available at Amazon.com), yesterday's feed was a list of ten interesting facts about characters in the book that are not necessarily revealed in the novel. These are intended as little bits that would flesh out the characters and richen the reading experience. If you pick up a copy of the book, come back to these Tweet feeds for some more rounding out of the story you'll hold in your hands!

Continuing the series this week of Tweet feeds themed with The Advance Guard, currently on sale through Amazon, yesterday's feed was the author's choice of best 10 lines from the book. Without further ado, here they are. Take them as you will, but remember that most of them are taken out of context: they were selected based on their intangible qualities, such as the intensity of emotion they portray, if they made me laugh while I wrote them, or they just strike me as seriously badass lines.
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